Current warnings of an imminent flu pandemic in the news make Eileen
Pettigrew’s account of the 1918 Spanish
Influenza
epidemic
topical. At the beginning of the book, Pettigrew quotes the adage
that after war comes plague, which is ominously relevant in our own
time.
Despite its name, Spanish
Influenza probably originated in China in
February 1918. It spread swiftly and by spring was even affecting
prosecution of the war in Europe. By May, so many sailors were
sick in England that the naval fleet could not leave port and entire
platoons of soldiers were unable to move.
Spanish Influenza was atypical in that it tended to afflict adults in
the prime of life, the same generation that was being wiped out on the
battlefield. In household after household, grandparents and
children survived and parents died.
The illness was characterised by terrible head and muscle aches and
utter, debilitating exhaustion. At first, it felt like a cold,
but quickly progressed, and too often culminated in deadly
pneumonia. Highly contagious, one infected person could quickly
infect a ship, a train, a school, or a community. In an era
before
antibiotics when vaccination was new, there was no effective
treatment and certainly no cure. It is estimated that 20 to 22
million people died worldwide, a shocking figure when you realise that
the population of Canada at the time was only 8 million.
It is generally accepted that the major source of infection was
soldiers returning home from the front. The contagion generally
spread from the Atlantic coast west, carried along the railways.
This gave the Prairies a few weeks warning, and westerners were soon
insisting that passengers be checked for flu before being allowed to
detrain. However, someone could seem perfectly healthy but be
carrying the germ, which was enough to spread the infection.
Schools had to be closed because of illness, but when
apparently-healthy children returned home from school dormitories, they
often took influenza with them. Many isolated communities
depended on ships for supplies, but too often germs were delivered
along with the mail and groceries. Out of reach of medical care,
whole settlements were eradicated. Pettigrew relates horrific
tales of single elderly or child survivors found without food or heat
in the company of corpses.
Businesses were closed, factories shut, public gatherings including
church services banned. Bell Telephone asked the public not to
use the phone unless absolutely necessary because so many staff were
away sick and medical personnel needed the lines. Many doctors
and nurses were in Europe at the front, so doctors came out of
retirement and teachers whose schools had closed volunteered to act as
nurses. Private and public buildings were taken over as makeshift
hospitals
Pettigrew tells a multitude of survivors’ stories. While nearly
all contain a degree of horror, many also speak of selfless service
from strangers and neighbours. Anonymous volunteers and the
people next door did laundry, cleaned house, fetched groceries, cooked
meals, fed livestock, chopped wood for stoves, and buried the dead.
On the last page, Pettigrew speculates how we would cope today in a
similar epidemic. While we have better communications – in 1918,
many had no telephone to call for help – many people no longer have
family nearby and do not know their neighbours. In 1918,
provinces and municipalities coped pretty much on their own, because
there was no federal health department; today, there is much better
co-ordination and co-operation from all three levels of government, and
even internationally. We have better diagnostic tests, better
access to vaccines, and antibiotics.
The Silent Enemy provides food for thought as we sit on the threshold
of the next influenza pandemic. Even with all the advantages of
improved communication and medicine, the speed with which resources
were overrwhelmed in 1918 suggests that we might not fare much better
eighty years later. Our medical facilities are already
overstretched by underfunding, just as they were by war in 1918.
Some bacteria are resistant to antibiotics and the effectiveness of flu
vaccines is being debated. It probably still remains as true
today as then that, in the event of such an enemy striking, our
greatest defence will be our care for one another.